dd cloning slightly different disks

[Christoph Kukulies]

Thanks, Peter and all others. Indeed, in contrary to the expected, I 
went into my office this morning, swapped the
HD against the SSD, and was able to boot both FreeBSD, Windows without a 
hitch or any other tweaking.

The dd over USB 2.0 to the SSD from the WD hard disk took 21261 s 
(nearly 6 hours)
I would possibly have had better results if I had both disks connected 
to a SATA controller
and did the dd there, but so what, I'm there happily.

Thanks for sharing.

--
Christoph
Will post bonnie results later.

Peter Steele schrieb:
> Theoretically, doing a straight dd copy of one disk to another and then swapping in that disk should work. I've done it, with no other tweaking needed. I've never done it with mixed OS instances on the same disk, or for that matter with a solid state drive. You'll lose the trailing 12GB of your disk, although you might be able to expand the last partition of whatever OS uses it to include this lost space....
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Christoph Kukulies
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 8:48 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: dd cloning slightly different disks
>
> Though not 100% FreeBSD centric, my question, I know that disk partitioning experts are around here.
> My noteook HD is a WD 5000BEVT, (500GB). Today I bought a Kingston SDnowV+ Solid State drive, 512GB, with the intention to make my notebook a bit faster. It's an Intel Core 2 Duo,
> 7400 CPU.
>
> The WD disk shows as having 976773168 sectors (500108 MB), the SSD has 1000215216 sectors (512110 MB).
>
> At the moment I'm copying (dd) from the WD internal disk to the SSD which I had put into an external SATA Icybox.
>
> I'm hoping to be able to use my FreeBSD and Windows partitions afterwards somehow, possibly with some geometry tweaking or what. Due to the different disk geometry I'm expecting that the partition table entries will be wrong.
>
> Any clues how I should proceed when the copy will be done in 7 hours or so? (20MB/s is the transfer rate I got from a short test that I did before starting the big copy).
>
> --
> Christoph
>